The worst rainstorm in Mexico since The Flood sets the somber, surrealist mood for Bad Habits, director Simon Bross’s sumptuous debut feature which peers at the elaborate rituals and devastating effects of eating disorders among three interconnected female characters.  A film with very little talking—out of the 104 pages of script, only 21 contain dialogue—but lots of eating, and not eating, and eating, and not eating, Bad Habits crafts together bite-sized episodes of obsessive behavior that, when taken together, make for a picture of contemporary women’s relationships to food that is as stomach-churning—literally—as it is tragic.  Through an emphasis on religious imagery and symbolism, it also says a cryptic thing or two about the influence that faith and devotion (and/or the lack thereof) might have on social attitudes towards eating in the modern world.

We first meet the character of Matilde as a child, when she believes to have saved her father from choking on a fish bone by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.  As an adult, Matilde goes on to earn her medical degree, but immediately after graduation, decides to join a convent.  Convinced that the violent rainstorm is God’s punishment for humanity’s sin of gluttony, Matilde covertly takes it upon herself first to consume inedible food, and then to quit eating altogether, as penance for the wrongdoings of those around her.  In a somewhat parallel scenario, one of her young communicants, a pudgy girl named Linda, struggles with a ballooning food obsession that her control-freak mother, Elena, is powerless to reverse.  Self-starving in her daughter’s place, the already svelte Elena adopts an anorexic’s regimen of water, cigarettes, and exercise that slims her down to meticulously manicured skin and bones—and sends her fed-up husband, Gustavo, clandestinely into the ample arms of a young Peruvian gourmande who shares his appetites for indulgent food and sex.

With its fantastical food montages, its moody, watery settings and its sensual focus on bodies of all kinds, Bad Habits makes for a luscious visual experience.  In its artistic interpretation of eating disorders, it also introduces into serious film a subject more typically relegated to cloying teen magazines and after school specials.  On a psychological level, however, I don’t believe that it succeeds at going much further beyond this introduction, to explore what actually makes his characters tick.  The film spends so much time watching people interact with food that we are led to believe that their inner lives consist of nothing else; that the scope of their every desire and disappointment begins and ends with the way they eat.  There is little humanity left to empathize with; little reason to care why these otherwise anonymous women are hurting themselves.  While Simon Bross has created a beautiful film about eating disorders, it does not quite succeed at being a film about people with eating disorders.

Camryn Hansen